Medieval and Manuscripts

Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOTC) (Amharic: የኢትዮጵያ ኦርቶዶክስ ተዋሕዶ ቤተ ክርስቲያን, romanized: Yä-ityop'ya ortodoks täwaḥədo betä krəstiyan), also sometimes known as the Abyssinian Church or the Church of Abyssinia, is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The EOTC is the first indigenous Christian church from sub-Saharan Africa and precedes the arrival of Western and European colonizers, who mostly followed Catholic and Protestant denominations, to the region by more than a millennium. It is also one of only three universally recognized Oriental Orthodox churches in Africa alongside the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church—and one of only two in sub-Saharan Africa—as the status of the Tigrayan Orthodox Tewahedo Church is still disputed by the broader Oriental Orthodox communion. Dating back to the Christianization of the Kingdom of Aksum by Coptic Orthodox missionaries in 330; it has between 38 million and 51 million adherents in Ethiopia, and 60 million members worldwide. It is a founding member of the World Council of Churches. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is in communion with the other Oriental Orthodox churches (the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch). The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church had been administratively part of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria from the first half of the 4th century until 1959, when it was granted autocephaly with its own patriarch by Cyril VI of Alexandria, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Tewahedo (Ge'ez: ተዋሕዶ täwaḥədo) is a Geʽez word meaning "united as one." This word refers to the Oriental Orthodox belief in miaphysitism, meaning one perfectly unified nature of Christ, i.e., a complete union of the divine and human natures into one nature is self-evident to accomplish the divine salvation of mankind, as opposed to the "two natures of Christ" belief commonly held by the Chalcedonian Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, and most other Protestant churches (which are predominant among Christians in Europe, the Americas, and most of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia), as well as by the non-Chalcedonian Church of the East, but not by most Restorationist denominations.

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See also

• ▸Cistercians
• ▸Lava lake
• ▸A mythology for England

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.